From Kafka to Gaza: On Seeing as Writers

A version of this text formed the opening address at the LUMS Young Writers Workshop 2025.

I feel at a loss to be wise tonight. For nearly two years now, we have been collectively consumed by the suffering unfolding in Palestine. I don't need to recount the numbers of babies, children, and pregnant mothers who have died, parents who have not been able to locate their dead children, students who have lost their teachers, teachers who have lost their families, doctors who have died inside hospitals... The human suffering that has been inflicted in Gaza in an extremely calculated manner already extends far beyond what generations of historians will be able to account for, or even reckon with. Not only have houses been reduced to rubble, but hospitals, schools, and libraries have been systematically destroyed, books burned.

Armageddon fills our news feeds every single day. We have watched these images of catastrophe play out on our screens daily. A whole city has been pounded with thousands of tons of bombs, reducing it to a mountain of black, smoking rubble.

The scale is unthinkable, even unimaginable. During its war in Vietnam, the US dropped about 15 tonnes of explosives per square kilometre of Vietnamese territory over eight years. Israel, on the other hand, has dropped 275 tonnes of explosives per square kilometre of Gaza in one and a half years—a figure that is higher by a factor of 18.

Like other writers, I too have been haunted by the same questions: how do we attend to writing with this suffering around us? Doesn't our work look trivial in the face of what is unfolding? How do we think of ourselves in relation to what is happening in Palestine?

I must confess though, I have also spent much of the past year and a half trying to avoid facing this tragedy squarely. I read only the headlines. I skimmed the details of what was happening, because what are you even to do in the face of such human suffering?

It is a question that has occupied me; impossible to evade, and impossible to answer.

If, as George Saunders says, stories offer us scaled models of our world, then what writers and what kind of writing can guide us in this moment of bleak horror?

For the past two years, I have found a port of refuge in Kafka. Tonight, I want to share with you a scene from his story that has served as a clarifying moment for me, and helped me gain a foothold in understanding what is unfolding before us.

In Kafka’s 1919 story In the Penal Colony, a native of the territory being utilized as the Penal Colony is condemned to death for disobeying the commandant of the colony. (Penal colonies were remote outposts where European colonial powers sent prisoners for punishment far from their homeland.) The condemned man does not know he has violated a law, but without any process of law, he has been declared guilty and sentenced to death by the officer. The condemned man doesn't know which act of his has constituted a violation of the law. Nor can he understand his sentence, because the law is written in a language he cannot read or comprehend.

His punishment is this: he will be strapped onto a machine that will bring him to a slow, meticulously charted death over a period of 12 hours. The condemned man will be laid flat and strapped on the bed of the machine, facing downward, and his mouth will be gagged with a piece of cloth—not to silence him, but to prevent vomiting and biting of the tongue during the long and painful execution process. His back is then met by a part of the machine that inscribes on his body the law he has violated. This instrument is fittingly named "The Harrow." It hangs above the bed and is composed of numerous fine, glass-like needles of various lengths. These needles move in a complex, oscillating pattern that cuts deeper with each repetition of the inscription. They also inject a corrosive liquid—an acidic solution—into the wounds of the condemned man as they inscribe, preventing clotting and intensifying the pain. This makes the engraving possible and legible for the full twelve hours the execution is meant to last.

The officer who has sentenced the condemned man explains this to his audience—a tourist in the penal colony—by saying that the condemned man will decipher the text of the law he has violated with the pain of his wounds. I want to emphasize this: the condemned man who cannot read the language is expected to “decipher” the text through the pain of his wounds as he dies.

This image feels like a description of the Palestinian condition. They do not know what law they have violated, except that they were born in that place. They must decipher their crime through the pain of the wounds being inscribed on their bodies.

Language in Kafka's story becomes a close accomplice of torture. The language of law mingles with the tortured man's pain, anguish, and cries, and turns into a spectacle for the entire audience present. One must remember that the genius architect of the machine has designed it such that the whole spectacle is visible to the audience that gathers to watch the execution. The language of the law is scripted with calculated human anguish and suffering. A bloodied, dead body of the condemned man—tortured slowly and clinically for several hours for a crime he does not know he has committed—writs large the law for everyone around him.

Remarkably though, there is no mention of the condemned man's suffering in the story. For a first-time reader, the story is actually about this awesome machine that has been designed with magnificent precision to transform the experience of death into something sublime for its audience. What receives attention in the story is its marvelous engineering, and the awe-inspiring spectacle it produces for its audience. This machine language, this death-language, does not at any point acknowledge the suffering of the condemned man. Instead, it speaks only in terms of efficiency, precision, and the aesthetic valorization of the "beauty" of how it carries out the death sentence.

Kafka's story offers perhaps the clearest account of the psychology of power at play in Palestinian suffering. Power is not looking to destroy its subjects, but to use their bodies to write a new law. A law is being inscribed slowly on Palestinian bodies, and the spectacle is being created for us, the audience.

It is important to note that Kafka's story is told by a dithering reporter, described as "the tourist." While the tourist does not ostensibly possess any authority, the entire spectacle of the machine is orchestrated to show the tourist the marvels of the machine and how the law will be illuminated through it. Reading this story, we cannot escape the realization: we are the tourists in Kafka's story. We might not have the authority to intervene, but as in the case of the Palestinians, we must remember that this spectacle is being orchestrated for us.

Kafka once observed to a friend: "Edschmid maintains that I smuggle miracles into ordinary events. Of course that is a serious mistake on his part. Ordinary events are a miracle in themselves. I only write them down. Maybe I illuminate things a little too, like a projectionist on a half-darkened stage. But that's not right. In reality, the stage isn't dark at all. It's full of daylight. That's why people close their eyes and see so little."

In the end, the only great writing lesson I have drawn from Kafka for the present moment is that writers don't see too much, they see too little. And our exertion should be to see more than we do, and see it all as connected, to see it all as relevant. The lesson from Kafka is to come to one's writing not to create illusions, but to shatter them. To see writing not as an instrument to further oneself, but as an instrument to take apart what one knows of oneself, and to let some light into the convenient darkness we have created for ourselves.

So as we begin this workshop, I ask you to write with the courage to see what others, perhaps you yourself, would prefer to ignore. Write as if our lives depend on the act of storytelling. Because our lives really do depend on it.